A post by NVIDIA tech support to the NVIDIA Forums looking to address driver restart issues connected with the latest GeForce reference drivers (thanks Mashiki). While noting that they have "been able to reproduce the major Battlefield 3 issues and have marked this as must fix for the upcoming driver in November," they have not been able to reproduce TDR (driver reset) issues, and are offering to pay roundtrip shipping to evaluate cards from users in the U.S. Here's the deal:

R280.xx or later Firefox/IE9 TDR issue - We have ordered some of the retail graphics cards that have been mentioned in these threads to resolve this issue. However it would be of great help to us if anyone who is facing this problem can send us their graphics card to diagnose internally at our Santa Clara office since the cards we have been tested so far do not seem to show the TDR issues end users are reporting in this forum. We can pay for shipping both ways and I can probably get some free game codes to offer you for your time. Please PM if you would be willing to do so. You must be in the USA however since international shipping can complicate things.

nvidia still has better drivers than AMD. Ill take an occasional TDR over horrible performance/visual issues/blue screens/crap OpenGL support any day of the week. To be honest though - I have never gotten a TDR unless I was overclocking the snot out of my card. I always assumed it was a heat issue so I treated it like one. Slightly lower overclock and no more TDR.

I don't get them with Battlefield 3, but I get them every time I start Rift right now after installing the newest driver.

I've also got the same power save problem as Beamer, and have had it since I installed the GTX570. I'm happy with the performance in games, but all these side issues are crap I never had when I had ATI cards...I doubt I'll buy another Nvidia card again after this one.

I've been seeing this issue with my SLI GTX 460s ever since I installed the beta BF3-beta/Rage driver (actually it was JUST BF3 at the time). The newest one still does it of course too, just not as much. As a matter of fact, it JUST did it not 10 min ago.

It does seem to be less common with the latest drivers for me. Before the beta driver, this issue was extremely rare for me. Now it's an almost everyday thing.

But of course, it could be worse. In the "old days" you'd get a BSOD when the driver did something odd.

Not Google-Fu, but first-hand experience. =P Having had the issue for over a month, I've been (fruitlessly) looking into solutions for just as long.

Glad to see an attempt is finally being made to resolve it... Hopefully.

Same here. Just picked up a GTX 570 and was getting timeout errors in certain games regularly. Funny enough, I noticed it happened more when I extended my desktop to another monitor. When I went into single display mode, it was much more stable. Either way, I'm glad this was acknowledged and I hope they get their shit together.

Beamer wrote on Oct 31, 2011, 11:04:I have a much larger issue with my system that I still haven't solved. It will reboot every time it goes into a power-saving mode, even if that power-saving mode is just shutting off the monitors.

This may be too obvious, but have you tried just changing your power options so that nothing ever shuts down?

In any case, if I had to guess, it's either a wonky Windows install, a bad PSU, or a bad mobo. Helpful, huh?

Morgan19 wrote on Oct 31, 2011, 10:55:TDR stands for "timeout detection and recovery"; it's apparently a part of Windows 7. From what I understand, what happens is that your computer reduces the power to your card, thinking nothing's using it, and Windows detects that as a problem and then the TDR error kicks in. When that happens, it makes your system freeze for a second, the screen goes black for 4-5 seconds, and then comes back with a "the display driver stopped responding" popup. It's not a hard crash (for me, anyway), but it can be annoying especially when it happens four or five times in under an hour.

I started getting them as soon as I installed a GTX 560 Ti last month, but the problem only seems to happen when I'm in Firefox. I've had three sets of Geforce drivers during the month and so far they've all done it.

Oh, hey, that started happening to me a few weeks ago but I just reinstalled the driver and it was ok.

I have a much larger issue with my system that I still haven't solved. It will reboot every time it goes into a power-saving mode, even if that power-saving mode is just shutting off the monitors. Occasionally it will reboot while I'm using it. It will also occasionally reboot when coming back from sleep mode, assuming it managed to go into it. And these rebooting fits come in for a week or two then disappear for a week or two, but during that week it will also crash when I try to install software.

Baffling. It passes every diagnostic exam. It very rarely gives me a blue screen so I can't check that. I think (but I'm not sure) changing any power options doesn't help, so it may be that it crashes just when it hasn't been used in a while. Having a movie running in the background at all times prevents the crashing entirely. I have no clue if this is motherboard, HDD or video card related. Certain aspects seem to indicate any of the above.

Yeah this got beyond annoying especially in the 280's. You'd figure after no less than 4 threads with 40-80 pages in each one they'd actually be looking at it. Most of the 280's are regarded as junk on evga and guru3d too. Not sure what they did but something went messy.

--"For every human problem, there is a neat, simple solution; and it is always wrong." --H.L. Mencken

TDR stands for "timeout detection and recovery"; it's apparently a part of Windows 7. From what I understand, what happens is that your computer reduces the power to your card, thinking nothing's using it, and Windows detects that as a problem and then the TDR error kicks in. When that happens, it makes your system freeze for a second, the screen goes black for 4-5 seconds, and then comes back with a "the display driver stopped responding" popup. It's not a hard crash (for me, anyway), but it can be annoying especially when it happens four or five times in under an hour.

I started getting them as soon as I installed a GTX 560 Ti last month, but the problem only seems to happen when I'm in Firefox. I've had three sets of Geforce drivers during the month and so far they've all done it.